Google has released a new API for Fusion Tables, a Google Labs app that allows users to import, integrate, analyze, and visualize data in a variety of ways. The new API allows developers to programmatically perform a variety of tasks, including data import and export (more at our Google Fusion Tables API Profile). The API itself is integrated with several other Google APIs, including the Google Maps API and the Google Visualization API. In fact, developers can also leverage App Engine to easily develop data processing and analysis apps that easily integrate with various other Google APIs.

Does your business use Excel spreadsheets to sort, organize, and make sense of data? Would the data generated by those spreadsheets be useful to partners, customers, or other departments within your organization? Datownia, a recent product from Release Mobile, generates an API from an Excel spreadsheet that allows developers to integrate their data with any website or app.

Last weekend at the AT&T Mobile Hackathon I had a pleasure of checking out the MongoLab's MongoDB service. In short: it was a delight to work with. I fell in love with that technology. It worked exactly the way I thought--MongoDB architects got it right. After spending a good part of the day fighting my hibernate configuration in JUnit I was pleasantly surprised when I saw that Mongo keeps their documentation and design accessible with plan old object and simple REST calls to its MongoLab API.